North Central and its $10 million benefactor

Fine arts center named for '63 grad

May 24, 2006|By James Kimberly, Tribune staff reporter.

The proposed Wentz Concert Hall and Fine Arts Center in downtown Naperville promises to be a state-of-the-art venue for North Central College's growing music program and touring musical acts that will draw people from throughout the western suburbs.

The $26.5 million project on 2 acres at Chicago and Ellsworth Avenues includes a 605-seat concert hall designed by the same acoustical engineering firm that consulted on Chicago's Millennium Park.

The concert hall is expected to draw musical acts from all over, benefiting the community and the school of about 1,900 full-time undergraduates.

"You'll have the equivalent of a cultural district. You will have a bunch of venues in the hottest downtown outside of Chicago," said North Central President Harold Wilde.

The center will bear the name of the project's largest contributor, a 1963 North Central graduate whose medical theories have been the subject of some controversy.

Myron Wentz donated about $10 million, and the college has raised an additional $16 million in hope of having the capital campaign completed by December 2007, Wilde said.

North Central has long wanted to build a fine arts center. The school's current venue, 1,050-seat Pfeiffer Hall, was built in 1926 and has not kept up with acoustic technology or the demands of the growing school and community, he said.

Wentz's gift gave the school the financial foundation it needed to go forward with the center, which will take about two years to build, Wilde said.

Wentz, who grew up in tiny Napoleon, N.D., said he decided to donate to the school after visiting it for the first time in 40 years.

"When I toured the campus and saw the needs I knew I had to do something," he said, "so I reached as deep as I could."

In addition to a biology and pre-med degree from North Central, Wentz holds a master's degree from the University of North Dakota and a PhD in microbiology with an emphasis in immunology from the University of Utah.

He founded a laboratory in 1974 in Salt Lake City and spent years studying cells and viruses. He developed several commercial tests for viral infections, including one still used today for the Epstein-Barr virus. Wentz sold his laboratory for $21.7 million, according to a Web site biography about him.

USANA Health Sciences uses person-to-person, multi-level marketing to sell a line of megadose vitamins for $50 a month. The firm was ranked No. 5 on Forbes' list of top 200 small businesses last year, but it also has its critics.

Dr. Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who has spent roughly 40 years investigating the claims of alternative medicine practitioners, said USANA makes "misleading claims about some of their products."

Wentz ran afoul of the American Dental Association when he published a book in 2004 titled "A Mouth Full of Poison: the Truth About Mercury Amalgam Fillings," which links fillings to illnesses.

The ADA says such claims are unsupported by science and that removing fillings potentially could harm a patient's teeth.

"We don't have any science to support that taking those fillings out is going to have any effect on their health," said Dr. Fred Eichmiller, director of the American Dental Association Foundation's Paffenbarger Research Center.

Wentz also operates the Sanoviv Medical Institute, an alternative medicine clinic in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, that offers treatment for conditions ranging from gum disease to cancer.

"We're seeing healing with degenerative diseases that we thought were incurable," he said. "I realize that is a bold statement."

Wentz said his unconventional views on medicine were honed during his years of laboratory research.

"I believe nutrition is the answer, not pharmaceutical drugs," he said. "I've never found one synthetic drug that is essential to the health and function of human cells."

Wentz notes that he also operates a medical center to treat infectious diseases in Uganda and is building another in Cambodia. He believes medical research will one day prove his theories about health.

"I know I am taking heat for it, but I'd rather be a leader than a follower," Wentz said.

Wilde, the North Central president, said Wentz's philosophies on medicine are irrelevant to his support for the school.

"If I were to deal with the implication of the question, I guess I would have to say, `We should no longer call Carnegie Library the Carnegie Library,'" Wilde said.